Comedian Stephen Colbert opened Monday’s The Late Show with a somber message, speaking eloquently of his horror at the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
“The United States came close to a great tragedy on Saturday when at a political rally down in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman shot and nearly killed a former president and the man who today became the 2024 Republican nominee,” Colbert, who is broadcasting from the Republican National Convention this week, said.
“My immediate reaction when I saw this on Saturday was horror at what was unfolding, relief that Donald Trump had lived and, frankly, grief for my beautiful country, and then fresh horror, as we learned that attendees had also been shot, one of whom died at the rally.”
Colbert added: “The entire objective of a democracy is to fight out our differences with—as the saying goes—a ballot, not a bullet.”
He said he had received a text from a “young” friend asking, “How is this happening in America in 2024?”
Colbert said: “I understood his shock, but I’m old enough that one of my earliest memories is sitting in a dark room with my sister watching my parents’ little black-and-white TV, and seeing Bobby Kennedy’s coffin on that slow train from New York down to Washington. And whether the result of extremist politics or mental illness, that violence is with us still—from the shooting at a GOP baseball practice that seriously injured Steve Scalise, to the plot to kidnap and kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, to the hammer attack that nearly killed Paul Pelosi, to the horrors of Jan. 6, to this most recent attack.”
He described shooter Thomas Crooks as “someone barely out of boyhood who reportedly donated to a Democratic group in 2021, then registered as a Republican that same year.”
Colbert quoted the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, saying: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
The Late Show host concluded: “In the wake of this attack on Saturday, many Americans on both sides of the aisle, from President Biden to Speaker Johnson, are calling on all this to change how we see each other, how we treat each other, how we talk to each other. That may or may not happen, but those conflicting ideas will remain the same. So this week, we’re going to do our best to talk about those ideas, the people who represent those ideas, and many other things, with guests and who knows, if we’re lucky, maybe some fart jokes.”
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